Why Chap O'Keefe rode into the Black Horse stable
NOBLE INDIAN SAYS NO

Keith Chapman

After I'd shifted to New Zealand, the slim paperbacks put out by an Australian firm, the Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd, had increasingly caught my eye. Previously, I'd seen them only sporadically, imported in limited quantities by distributors Gordon & Gotch and available at a few selected bookstalls in London. One was under the Holborn Viaduct in Farringdon Street, where I'd had my first job at Fleetway House, headquarters of the big magazine and story-paper publishers. Now, at the other end of the world, I saw new Cleveland titles every month in every corner shop.

The books themselves were low-priced and not very grand — just 100 pages including cover, digest-sized and held together in one, single-fold signature (or section) by two wire staples through the spine.

The Sydney company's output included the Larry Kent hardboiled thriller series, war stories and romances. But most of their "pulp" style fiction was westerns. The main series was Cleveland Westerns, with an emblem of a noble Indian chief's head. Santa Fe Westerns, Winchester Westerns, Cougar Westerns, Bison Westerns and Bobcat Westerns were some of the others, all with their own appropriate little badges, and most with great covers. Cleveland, like Hale, used agency-supplied western cover art, including some by the popular Faba and Prieto Muriana.

One of western fiction's lost symbols.

The Cleveland writers' pen-names included Marshall Grover and Kirk Hamilton. The authors behind these two were both later published in Black Horse Westerns, Grover under his real name of Leonard Meares, while Hamilton (James Keith Hetherington) still appears today as Jake Douglas, Tyler Hatch, Clayton Nash and Hank J. Kirby. Some of the old Grover books for Horwitz, another Australian outfit, have been republished in Linford Western Library large-print editions, as have Hetherington's BHWs.

Given my own background in magazines and books in England, I saw the possibility of a writing opening at Cleveland for myself. But it was some years since I'd been the editor and a scriptwriter for Micron Publications' early Western Adventure Library and Cowboy Adventure Library pocket books. Living now in Auckland, I needed the security of full-time employment there.Writing westerns and other fiction had been pushed aside by the responsibilities of housing, feeding and clothing a family.

Because New Zealand had no "pulp fiction" industry, I'd moved into general magazine, then daily newspaper journalism.

It was not until many years later, in 1992, that I finally enquired about writing for Cleveland, having put together the bones of a book I called Lawless Valley. I received a reply from Jennette McNair, in Brookvale, Sydney. She wrote, "We currently have drawers full of unedited western manuscripts, submitted by our regular writers who have been writing our novels profusely for the past 20 years, so we are not interested in obtaining any more stories for years to come. We will keep your letter on file — maybe you might be interested in doing some editing some time?"

Apt "in memoriam" to the Aussie pulps.

I responded to this lukewarm invitation, but it was as well that I didn't sit waiting. I never heard from the company again. I could imagine that noble Cleveland Indian grunting "No!"

It seemed I'd left it too late. The Cleveland output had dwindled to a few titles a month which were no longer widely stocked. The magazine racks were full of sports, home decorating, gardening, computer, business and other practical journals — but the public appetite for fiction, we were told, was now catered to more than adequately by TV drama series and video movie rentals. Even the last comic-book titles I'd freelanced for, "ghost" yarns published by the Charlton group of Connecticut, were no longer around.

That left me with a partly written western novel on my hands. Where should I send it?

What I'd written was very much in a style dictated by the rugged Cleveland and other books of the 1970s and later. But it also reflected what I'd read as a youngster — the serials in British story papers, like The Rover, The Wizard and Adventure, and the novels that had been published in the Amalgamated Press Western Library. This 1950s Fleetway House series had carried reprints of classic westerns by writers like Ernest Haycox and Max Brand, as well as new material in a similar vein by Britons including Sydney J. Bounds (James Marshal) and Gordon Landsborough (Mike M'Cracken).

So to turn it around, and draw a movie analogy, what I had before me was something like an old-style Hollywood adventure crossed with the violent shoot-'em-up of the later "spaghetti" tradition made on location in Spain. Not that I believe the latter were quite the radical departure some would have us believe. Think of Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz, made in Mexico in 1954.

The Chap O'Keefe westerns can be painted as a belated attempt to provide the "missing link" in the evolution of one style to the other. Perhaps it had all been foreshadowed by my work on the translations of the many Spanish westerns we'd used at Micron in the 1960s.

How well I've succeeded in blending classic and later styles is debatable. But reassuringly, an Amazon UK customer's review of my last western, Frontier Brides (November 2004), not only gave the book five stars, but recommended it as a starting point for newcomers to BHWs and the whole western genre!

In 1992, a good market opportunity for my homeless book seemed to lie with the Robert Hale company in the UK. For a start, they were publishing the best-looking westerns anywhere, Black Horse Westerns, and had a quota to fill every month. Possibly here was a stable where the doors would stay open and I could find a stall for my "horse". I also knew that some of the contributors to publications I'd edited in London had later become Hale western writers, most notably Vic J. Hanson and the previously mentioned Sydney J. Bounds.

Interestingly, Cleveland writer Hetherington popped up on Hale's list as Jake Douglas in 1995 and Paul Wheelahan (Cleveland's Brett McKinley and Emerson Dodge, but famous in Australia as a comic-book artist) in 2000 under his own name. Hetherington has been especially prolific.

But back before then, I followed my usual practice, sending Hale a few details of the major characters and a fairly comprehensive outline of the plot. A swift reply said, "It would indeed seem suitable for our western series but we are only seeking typescripts of about 45,000 words in length."

A month later, I sent the finished book, and another swift letter back detailed the terms the company could offer with just one other comment: "We have used this title before so would appreciate your suggesting some alternatives." I sent them nine by return. Little more than a week after that, I received a publishing agreement for my signature, incorporating the top title off my list. Thus Lawless Valley became Gunsmoke Night, which appeared as a BHW in September 1993 and later in a Linford Western Library large-print edition. But Cleveland never did get to publish a Chap O'Keefe western.

Bursting on to the BHW scene.

By the time my first Black Horse Westerns were appearing, the stern-looking Indian, whose face had once been on the back of all those dozens of booklets in the magazine racks, was no longer around. Had he gone to the happy hunting ground?